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A friend who is into medieval footwear likes to observe how our reproduction shoes wear and tear with use, comparing that to the wear patterns on extant medieval shoes.

Wear patterns are also visible on clothing. They tell us the story of how the item was or wasn’t worn. Sometimes the lack of wear can be a most telling thing – like in the case of the dress piece from Turku cathedral which turned out to have been worn by a statue instead of a person.

Repairing and readjusting my old dress has led to delightful observations of wear in just the the proper places. Great! My friend with the inclination towards shoes had this theory, that a good reproduction wears in the same places as the extant originals.

Besides the obvious hem and armpits, the dress is worn at the tips of the gores (think where the Moy bog gown was patched) and at the waist, where I have worn a belt and it shows (just like, say, on the Bocksten tunic). Also the closures, button stalks and innner edge of lacing holes (think London finds) show wear.

I’ve been thinking a lot about wear and the use of clothing, kind of carrying on from my previous post. The red dress is probably my most used and worn dress. However, it had only a maximum of two years of heavy event use, which adds up to only about 60 days of active wear.

So on the terms of medieval everyday life and consumption, the dress is still brand new.

That really makes me think. (<- insert minicrisis here)

The hard core of my hobby is a personal quest to strive towards giving a portrayal that would be as authentic as possible. And medieval people did NOT constantly parade around in brand new clothing!

Facing the facts: most medieval people didn’t have such an extensive wardrobe as many living history folks these days do. Clothing was well worn and worn out, changed, recycled, mended, sold, given to servants and bequeathed as we well know.

Actually one of the coolest clothing – related stories in a while was the story of how one of the men (can’t remember who) from Albrechts bössör had bled on his tunic and during the night a helpful rodent found his clothes and neatly chewed off the bloody spots. Now the tunic has these holes neatly mended.

And the moral of the story is that you should mend and wear your clothes with pride and joy (regardless of icky stuff happening) – that is if you want to look like a real medieval person instead of a well dressed exhibition dummy in a museum.

Then why is it so hard?

1) Making clothes is fun! And the feeling of showing off something new is great. Also, clothes tend to improve as you make more of them. For me at least it took several years tolearn how to make a dress that I was happy enough with to let it age with wear.

2 ) There is this odd pressure to keep making new things even if you don’t really need them. Now I’m not proclaiming that from now on I will lurk about on dirty broken old clothing like an extra from a bad historical movie, since the medieval sensibility also dictates that to be proper you should still keep tidy and your clothes mended, even if they were old. But just sayin’ that things like having points deduced in a competition just because the dress you entered had been worn is downright silly if you think about what went on historically. But it is all a matter of medieval and modern sensibilities and aesthetics clashing I think. Nowadays we are inclined to think that only new stuff is pretty.

3) We live in historically unusual times of abundant consumption, cheap stuff and throwaway fashion. We are used to have something new to wear, especially when something fun or important happens. Really, living history folks do worry about having nothing new to wear, when the problem should actually be the opposite!

i love mending my clothes :) i also do it with modern clothes (i’m bad at throwing things away). when things get to bad (one of the mister’s old tunics was badly eaten by moths for example) i like making new things out of the parts that still look decent enough -> it became a new hood for me.

in this light, one of the things that strikes me always is that extant clothing is nearly always made of patches, in the sense that when the fabric piece wasn’t big enough for the pattern piece, they just added a strip of fabric (so tha tone pattern piece consisted of two or more pieces of fabric). reenactors never do this (or hardly ever).

next to mending clothes, the above thing is something that makes medieval clothes feel really medieval to me :)

Last year I put a lot of work in repairing and adjusting a medieval jacket my husband had “inherited” from a friend:
It was this friends favourite jacket that he wore for about 6 years but then got damaged by moths over the winter… He was so unlucky about that, he didn’t want it repaired, he wanted a new one that just looked like the old one!
I asked for the damaged jacket to repair it (and fit it to my husband how is somewhat broader in the chest) so we could demonstrate on future events that clothes were sold or given to another owner quite frequently :-)
Now we have Andreas (our friend) in his spanking new jacket as the rich merchant and Andi (my husband) in the very worn, patched and altered jacket “10 years later”.

I’d really like to do this more often – but repairing and adjusting took me almost twice as much time as making a new one would have… I don’t think many people like to invest so much time into worn clothes ;-)

I really like this post! When I started reenacting 14th century with Albrechts Bössor it was a liberation to get rid of the idea ” make a new dress for every event”. Sometimes I’ll miss being brand new but it’s an overgoing feeling. I like when my things are becoming of age. My orange dress is only 5 years old but dead already. I’ve learned to plant dyeing in a aluminum pot is slowly but surely eating the fabric. A knowledge I wouldn’t have done in my old group cause I would have giving it away before it was broken. Now I try to weave fabric on my own, and when doing the hole process from plant dyeing, weaving and sewing one comes most aware that time is a thing of value. I don’t throw my time and money away. I want things to last.

Thank you for this post. Clothing wear–and repair–is one of my interests that nobody in my area seems interested in. For that matter, I’ve found very little (other than scant notes in archaeological finds) on how clothing was repaired.